What is a lead in marketing? Definition, types and practical examples

At Marquiz, we constantly recommend using quizzes to gather warm leads and nurture cold ones. But we've never discussed who's considered a lead and who's not, how the target audience differs from a client, and why the former doesn't always become the latter.

Let's figure it all out in this article. We'll use a computer game, a tree metaphor, and a dummy company to help us. And if you're already enlightened in marketing consciousness and don't question what a lead is, keep using quizzes and nurturing potential buyers.

What is a lead?

A lead is not yet a buyer, but no longer just a passerby. Sounds complicated? We understand, let's break it down.

⏸️ Disclaimer:‍

Let's call our first helper — the computer game "Collect Leads":

🎮 Game conditions:

Various visitors come to your website, you need to attract potential clients, get them interested in buying, and obtain their contact information.

🎮 Game objective:

Level up your character to the maximum and close a deal

🎮 Game attributes:

Any advertising tools, banners, buttons, quizzes.

Usually in a game, as you pass levels, you level up your character and develop skills to face the final boss.

In sales, the final boss is closing a deal, and for that to happen, you need to warm up a person from just a passerby/website visitor/target audience to a potential client.

And the connecting link between the coldest visitor and the hottest lead becomes a quiz:

📚 Passerby ➡️ Interested lead ➡️ Buyer

So it's a game character who has already leveled up their trust in you, as a brand, as a company, so much that they recognize you and your product out of thousands, but they're not yet ready to run to you with money flying behind them to make a purchase.

Like in a game, you level up the client. They reach a certain level and become a lead, then grow to level 80 and turn into a buyer, a regular, an ambassador🔝. It depends on how much you continue to level them up.

For now, let's focus on the lead. This concept differs slightly in marketing and sales.

What is a lead in marketing?

In marketing, it's a simplified version of our game. Your attributes are only an advertising campaign and various channels of communication with clients.

🎮 Game flow in marketing:

You set up advertising for your audience, encourage them to click on a link and leave their contact information.

🔑 Banality: the better your ad creatives and the more accurately they hit the audience's needs, the more often visitors will come to the site and become leads. Because they understand why they're doing it.

🎮 Winning the game:

Collect enough leads — contacts left after viewing the ad.

What is a lead in sales?

Sales is a game for hardcore setting lovers. All methods of communication with a potential client come into play: calls, feedback forms, social media accounts.

🎮 Game flow:

Connect all working tools to attract as many leads as possible.

🎮 Winning the game:

Collect all possible leads by all possible means.

🎮 Let's go:

When does a cold website visitor become a lead? From the outside, it might seem like they're twin brothers, but in reality, a lead has already leveled up their communication with the company. They've already taken some action to give you their contact:

• left an email,
• completed a quiz,
• requested a callback.

Communication with them won't look like spam. This way, you reduce the tension in communication between you. Now you can send them an email, push notification, promotion, discount, call and make a personalized offer.

Types of leads

The game is over, we have leads in our arsenal. Now let's take a closer look at what these leads are.

If we use a tree metaphor, it's clear that not all branches will bear many fruits, some of them will dry up and not a single leaf will appear. It's the same with leads, they can be different and vary in quality. There are two global classifications of leads:

🌳 by degree of interest

🌳 by degree of readiness to buy

Leads by degree of interest in the product

The tree grows, and depending on conditions, weather, and other factors, it will develop differently. Some branches will be powerful and yield a harvest that will feed everyone, while others will dry up almost immediately.

It's the same with leads: some will be targeted, while others will be non-targeted.

Some are definitely interested in your product, while others just came to look around. And it's important to be able to separate quality leads and understand who to work with further.

👋 To segment leads, you can use his majesty quiz. Quality and simple questions will show what problem the lead came to you with and how your product can help them.

Leads by degree of readiness to buy

In this classification, there are three types of leads:

• cold
• warm
• hot

⏸️ Disclaimer:‍

You can segment your audience using questions in the quiz. For example, your company deals with glazing, but you only work with industrial premises, regular apartments aren't interesting to you. So one of the quiz questions will sound like this:

❓ How many square meters is your premises?

And so you'll immediately see if the client is suitable for you or it's better not to waste time on cooperation.

How to collect leads?

Use tools for lead generation. Here, our dummy company enters the scene - the last helper in this material.

Let's say there's an event agency, for which a cold lead is potentially any person, and a hot lead is a person who has signed up for a free consultation. The company's marketers sit down and think about how they can promote the business online:

• Launch advertising on Meta and send a person to a chatbot.
• Add a description on Google Maps and put a link to the website and quiz.
• Launch advertising to the website.
• Set up a quiz with registration for a consultation. By the way, we have one in our template gallery.
• Leave a button with a callback order on the website.

And all of these are ways to attract leads to our service. Some of them will give high conversion, and some won't. Essentially, when we talk about attracting leads, we mean attracting traffic - cold, warm, or hot. And then we think about what lead processing techniques will warm them up to the degree we need.

The marketers of our dummy company test different tools, collect figures for each attraction channel, and look at where lead generation works well and where it falters.

And sales managers carefully store all the information in the CRM system to slowly but surely warm up all the received applications.

Who needs lead generation

Everyone.

All companies need clients. Before a person becomes a client, they're a lead for the business. So we turn on the lead generation machine and forward, vacuum up leads on the internet.

FAQ

Let's summarize in FAQ format:

Which channels bring leads?

Any advertising channels: you can set up targeted and contextual advertising, manage social media, create quizzes, arrange partner promotions - each idea will bring leads. But whether they'll be cold or hot depends on the contact with the audience.

How to calculate the cost of a lead?

Like in a school math problem:

The company spent $2000 on advertising and attracted 100 leads. The cost of a lead turned out to be — X $. Find X.

The solution to the problem is extremely simple:

🤓 net advertising budget / number of leads = average cost per lead

With this formula, you can understand how effectively each of your lead generation channels is working.

How does a quiz collect leads?

A quiz is one of the tools to collect and warm up leads. Questions help learn more about your client, understand what problem they came with, and find a solution to this problem. Questions, like warm mittens in a terrible frost, warm not only hands but also your client's need 🔥, and conversion grows to 6-50% depending on the niche.

Try quizzes for lead generation, at Marquiz we give 10 bonus leads for registration. This is enough to create and test your quiz.

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